The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

Today, Google Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Salesforce.com made a massive investment - $32 million - into Hubspot, the company at the forefront of the Inbound Marketing movement. Hubspot's had impressive growth, reaching more than 4,000 customers in their 4 years on the market. The founders, Brian + Dharmesh, authored an NYTimes best-seller on Inbound Marketing, and the Grader series of tools have been used by millions.

To see these three investors, particularly Google Ventures, put a big backing behind the power of SEO, social media and content marketing (the three cornerstones of Inbound Marketing) is inspiring. It suggests to me that we're moving beyond the era of these marketing practices existing only for early adopters toward a more mature market. That's a great thing for practitioners as it typically means many years of growth, employment, higher salaries and increasing adoption. It also, however, portends greater competition.

What's Inbound Marketing?

In case you're not familiar, here's a diagram illustrating the techniques that fit the Inbound Marketing paradigm:

Traditional marketing, and probably what Fred Wilson was talking about when he called out "marketing" as a poor investment is what we'd call "outbound." It relies on advertising, paid branding, salespeople, cold-calling, etc. Inbound marketing is what nearly everyone who reads this blog practices - it's about getting traffic from search engines, from content (blog posts, articles, videos, infographics, white papers and webinars) and from social media (Twitter, Facebook, the Blogosphere, forums and social news sites).

Why are Google, Salesforce + Sequoia putting money into this field?

Because "Inbound Marketing" is for real. Both Salesforce's CRM and Google (via a million sources) both have a ton of data about what drives traffic and conversions on the web, and I think both are seeing the signs all pointing to Inbound Marketing. Hubspot is the most natural choice, as very few companies at scale are reaching their numbers or penetration.

I have one, quick bone to pick with the upper-right-hand chart - the competitors chosen; Eloqua, Marketo, Genius, Pardot, Manticore, Neolane, etc. are all in the marketing automation, lead tracking or lead nurturing fields, which isn't really the space in which Hubspot's playing. Their product may have some overlap with these, but none of the other companies listed are philosophically into "inbound marketing," they're into helping customers track leads, however they come. Hubspot's trumpeting the power of these newer traffic sources and focusing their software on measuring and improving them.

I'd say that a more accurate market players list would include firms like PostRank, Klout, Compendium, Optify, Buddy Media, Hootsuite and, possibly, SEOmoz. The features don't match up, but the goal - to measure and improve inbound channels from search, social + content marketing - strikes me as more accurate.

Can Google Invest in SEO Software?

I wouldn't be surprised to see comments on some of the tech industry publications decrying an investment by Google in a software firm that helps sites rank better. However, I think this investment is about something much broader than climbing the rankings - it's about recognizing a shift in consumer and business buying behavior and wanting to play a part in that market.

Salesforce is actually an excellent corollary and a smart choice as an investor. They disrupted the marketing software world the first time, when businesses switched from guessing about how to track+optimize a funnel to implementing software that made it work. Today, the CRM (Customer Relations Management) software field remains dominated by Salesforce (though up-and-comer Infusionsoft and traditional competitors like SAP, Inuit and Act all have nice chunks).

There's a lot of parallels between what Salesforce did in CRM and what Hubspot is trying to do in marketing. The cognitive leap between traditional measurement analytics and true recommendations is precisely what Hubspot wants to fill. To use the words of Google's own Avinash Kaushik "Google Analytics (is) mostly a glorified data puker."

How's HubSpot Doing?

As the graphic above shows, not too shabby. I asked Dharmesh to share some additional data and he was able to provide some interesting data points:

Are there Other Signals Inbound Marketing is Growing?

You can see from LinkedIn that Inbound Marketing job titles and open positions are substantive. Basically, I'm drawing the conclusion that this meme has legs.

My view is that it's a good day for Hubspot (who's now raised $65 million!) and a good day for all of us in the Inbound Marketing ecosystem. Next time someone asks you whether all this SEO, social media + blogging stuff is for real, you can tell them it's real enough that Google Ventures, Salesforce and Sequoia put $32 million of their own investment dollars behind it.

Just watch out - as we pass into the early majority with Inbound Marketing, the competition's going to heat up and a lot more marketers are likely to find themselves backed by good software.

I would say this instead:

Just watch out - as we pass into the early majority with Inbound Marketing, the competition's going to heat up and a lot more of self-proclaiming marketers are likely to find themselves backed bt good software.

Infact, I still believe that there is not going to be an obliged incompatibility between Internet Marketing Agencies (or Consultant, like me) and software, even if it is good as the Hubspot, SEOmoz or Raven Tools ones.

All the contrary, I think that the main advantage of the democratization of software is not a real danger for serious well rounded and always learning web marketers, but for those self-proclaiming ones, the snake oil salesmen, because businesses will (and are) learning more and better what's this thing we call Inbound Marketing.

Therefore, the right combination of In House expertize and the experience in search and inbound marketing an agency or an consultant own still is and still will be the best combination possible. And software a great way to think less to daily tasks and more time for creativity and pure marketing.

That is why I believe that the biggest lesson a wonderful event, like this one happened to our friends of Hubspot, is:

SEOs, the time is coming when you'll need to choose one of these paths:

I have done the 30 day trial of Hubspot and their program is absolutely amazing. The amount of education available there at Hubspot is tremendous. If I could convince my wife to move to Boston or Mike Volpe to open a Kansas City branch, I would be at either place in a heartbeat. The Inbound Marketing book is a fantastic resource. Guilty of being a fanboy of both Hubspot and SEOMoz. Smart money follows smart people.

I think your video may be where I discovered SEOMoz or where I took a serious look at it and then became a Pro member. Very happy you contributed a video. Btw, I like your book, I am half-way through it now. :)

Most welcome. I really am a fan. I suggest Hubspot and SEOMoz at the networking groups I go to. Its a great gauge as to whether someone is serious about improving their markeing or are they just at an event to suck down some more coffee and chat. Also amazing that Hubspot has gold medal talent with at least one olympian working there. I can barely imagine how fantastic it is to work in a company of so many excited and talented people. :)

Hubspot is definitely in the right place at the right time. For that matter, so is SEOmoz. I really believe we are nowhere near seeing even a fraction of the awesome potential marketing and the internet has to offer business.

Absolutely. We're still in the internet's infancy... I can't wait to see what happens as online business tools and practices mature.

Thanks to the "Law of Accelerating Returns" I imagine the differences between tools and practices (and profit) of today and those of 2016 will be far far wider than the differences between 2006 and now.

"I have one, quick bone to pick with the upper-right-hand chart - the competitors chosen; Eloqua, Marketo, Genius, Pardot, Manticore, Neolane, etc. are all in the marketing automation, lead tracking or lead nurturing fields, which isn't really the space in which Hubspot's playing."

That's interesting because I attended a webinar a few weeks ago, signed up for a free trial but wasn't able to put the 'code' on the company site I was working on because it would have taken programming assistance that they just didn't have.

When HubSpot called me (which was great customer service!) we had a little chat and the main thing the saleswoman was pushing was the fact that all their leads filtered into their CRM and made tracking super simple. My point was that they already had a custom CRM so we really couldn't use it, we are blogging content every day, and on Twitter and Facebook, etc. etc. Then, she decided to tell me that our main landing pages were not SEO optimized and I laughed and had to tell her we would agree to disagree on that one, and she lost me. :)

But they were really pushing the lead tracking on my sales call so maybe they want to be where those competitors are?

Hmm.. Interesting. I know the founders and I've demo'd the software, but I've never had someone from the sales team call me up, so my experience is probably pretty different.

To be honest, this is a reason I prefer SEOmoz's model of letting people find us, try the product and subscribe if they like it vs. selling with salespeople. Hubspot has some great ones (I met two sales guys there on my last visit who were total SEO/social media marketing dorks - and I mean that in the best possible way), but the incentive is to sell, so the handling of the featureset and focus might shift from customer to customer. That's not to say we always get it right here, just that I like the self-service SaaS model, personally.

Lead tracking and attribution is something we haven't worked/focused on at all at SEOmoz. I think that makes it harder to see the value you might get from what we make, but it's just not something I'm passionate about vs. finding traffic opportunities and helping execute on them in the right kinds of ways.... Makes me wonder about whether we'll need that in the future, though.

I have nothing against good sales people and I was really impressed that they called me.

In the work that I am doing now, keeping track of leads and attribution is huge because they have advertising accounts that have to be justified. The custom CRM that they use in-house is amazing where we get to see all the different touches that came from our marketing and run reports on it. I love it.

HubSpot looks great and I'm super impressed by all of their content and webinars. I have not gone through it entirely but I did try and sign up for the free trial to get started but it just didn't work out. A lot of it looks rather basic but I'm sure there are advanced sections that I just didn't see from my quick browse a few weeks ago.

Watch one of their webinars and they will call you. Not that I consider that a bad thing. I get 4-5 calls a week from firms who are just completely cold-calling me, where at least with HubSpot I expressed some basic interest in things they may offer.

It can be a little shocking if you don't think of the "free" webinars out there as nothing more than a sales pitch. Typically the title will be something like "How to Make Social Media a Core Part of Your SEO Strategy", the webinar will describe the issues, vaguely how you can address the issues with social media, and then a pitch on how the company sponsoring the webinar can make everything better. But for the average person, they might think of webinars as completely educational. In general, there's educational value but there's some slight bias towards the sponsor's solutions :)

I'm used to it, so I always expect a call the day after attending a webinar.

Lead tracking and attribution is not something you NEED to focus on, but the value add for doing so will be tremendous, especially for small businesses who have no CRM system at all. However, if and when you get to this, keep it simple! Something anyone can use from their browser or their smart phone.

In terms of us encouraging customers (and potential customers) to use our lead management and tracking -- guilty as charged! We're really passionate about the *integration* of various marketing apps into a single platform. Lead management is a big piece of that. However, we don't provide a full CRM solution (we integrate to leaders in the CRM space for that -- like Salesforce.com, NetSuite and SugarCRM).

I definitely believe they told you that however I think the person that said we can't help you get your code into the CMS was guilty not using the best judgment when giving someone answer. They import websites into the content management system whole websites for $10 a page it does take up to 14 days the norm is less than 5 I believe the person you spoke to may have been possibly confused? they deal with a lot of people every day who want their site imported right away so they give a longer time. If you want to put code like for instance a video or call to action in the HubSpot CMS you can do that by clicking

Unfortunately during the trial stage you are unable to import your website. However you are able to open the CMS and you will see a blank page that has a orange top. With navigation bar to add code it add content then select HTML after that paste. I know they have helped out prospective customers that are friends of mine when I asked if they paid the regular $10 per page import fee can they see there webpage will perform I have never been told no. I do agree with Rand I've never been cold called I have probably helped over 10 people import websites and 3 myself. I believe I received a phone call asking how was going and once you do sign up you are assigned someone who will work with you anytime you need assistance at HubSpot. Although what you said about outbound marketing is not completely unrealistic HubSpot spends tons of money and pay per click and tells their customers not to use it. However they are in one of the hardest if not the hardest industry to rank in if I were in their shoes and had a product like that I would do the exact same thing because there climbing in Google but they need customers to do that. I wanted to let you know in less you have flash or Silverlight content in your website that you are unwilling to have made to HTML 5 the HubSpot CMS will work unfortunately you may have been speaking to a person that did not understand the question or possibly not know the answer. I love HubSpot and don't want that to sound like I'm speaking ill of them however if you have a common HTML sight the migrations team at HubSpot would definitely be able to import your website. Once the site has been imported by the migrations team there is a fee of either $5 or $10 a page once the site has been imported you may notice small irregularities you must report this to the migrations team things like duplicate links (there are rare but you want to check your site) the text or line start matching up perfectly on your site. Tell that to HubSpot they will fix it at no additional cost. I want to say I love HubSpot and I believe they have a fantastic philosophy the best thing for me is that SEOmoz and HubSpot both are into inbound marketing and I do agree with Rand SEOmoz definitely can get to the bottom of a problem more thoroughly and quicker. I have to tell you I believe both brands when put together to make a fantastic synergy. Please feel free to contact me if for whatever reason you have a HTML website that HubSpot tells you it will not import. I would be happy to help.

Please get Dharmesh to come back to the SEOmoz Seminar in 2011! The presentation he gave in 2009 was really interesting and I like how Hubspot frames SEO in the larger context of business. For those of us who have SEO as only part of our jobs it is really useful to keep perspective on how SEO relates to everything else in marketing/business.

Before I was with SEOMoz I used Hubspot for almost 2 years. The product is great but I have to admit that SEOMoz has been better for me. They have software that is great for people who want an integrated platform and is perfect for a small business. When you get into bigger companies with factory driven template sites their software model doesn't plug-in so nicely.

The pumping of money into Hubspot shows how valueable the SEO movement is and how there is tremendous opportunity at this time. From my experience with Hubspot and SEOMoz the basics are still the same - content, blog and social media. Basically give people something of value and quality that they want and interact with them. Basic but so hard to do!

I'm in the same boat; I used HubSpot for about a year and a half before switching to SEOmoz. My main reasons for switching:

Level of SEO expertise: HubSpot's tools, knowledgebase and consultants (in my experience) are focussed on small businesses just getting started with online marketing. While HubSpot was good for getting the SEO ball rolling, I felt like I quickly outgrew the level of technical SEO support I could get through their tools and support forum. This is probably not an issue for 90% of their users, but if you already have some SEO background, you'll probably be underwhelmed.

Stickyness of their Tools: To really get the most out of HubSpot, you have to use their website, blog and form content management systems. These tools, and the way they integrate, can provide you with some great tracking on your visitors/lead, and could be very helpful for small businesses without technical resources. However, if you decided to drop the service, you lose your blog, website and forms. To me, I could not afford to be that tied to a single solution.

Customer Service: HubSpot has is run and made up by some very smart and fun people. In my experience, they were also very busy people.

SEOmoz's Progressiveness in Developing SEO Tools: The tool I most missed most in dropping HubSpot was their keyword grader tool (which tracks level of competition, estimated traffic, and your ranking in one view). When we made the switch, SEOmoz was still working on their Pro dashboard and still developing their keyword competition tool. However, from the other free SEOmoz tools I had demoed, I could tell you guys were doing some great things, and that your SEO-specific tools would soon surpass the SEO-specific tools I had been using with HubSpot. So major kudos, and keep up the great development work!

Cost: Just sayin'

All that said, glad to hear of HubSpot's success; it should help continue to drive the field of organic SEO forward.

1. HubSpot primarily focuses on small businesses who are often relatively new to inbound marketing -- and are encountering SEO for the first time. We're on a mission to help educate the market that inbound marketing works -- which I think helps all of us.

2. On the SEO front, our tools are nowhere near as sophisticated as SEOmoz. In fact, I'm a SEOmoz Pro member myself and we use some of the moz data in the HubSpot product.

3. Unless you're using several of the applications in the HubSpot suite (like lead management and forms), the price is usually prohibitive.

As a SEOMoz member and advocate since 2009 and a tire-kicker of HubSpot for almost as long, it is with great excitement that we announce eBiz ROI joining the HubSpot VAR program. The point of announcing this here is that I see the SEOMoz and HubSpt tools as complimentary. Without question, both HubSpot and SEOMoz are thought leaders in SEO, Marketing Automation respectively. As any users of inbound.org know, when Rand and Dharmesh work together, good things happen.

Sorry for the intended oversimplification but IMHO SEOMoz is about cutting edge SEO to grow quality, targeted, sustainable organic traffic and staying out of the Google penalty box while HubSpot is about broader business objectives (leads, sales, ROI) and by being broad, is by definition, thinner in SEO.

Successful Internet marketing, espeically in b2b is about way more than just the traffic piece. The traffic piece, whle necessary, is not sufficient. Internet/Inbound marketing is about increasing conversion rates from traffic to clicks to leads with quality landing pages and enticing content, automatically nurturing those leads through a well-defined. learning sales funnel, while providing a 365 degree view of the customer based on interactions that can be tracked after the first conversion, going back to the original user visit to a website. SEOMoz + HubSpot = enhanced ROI. And oh yeah, a ton of honest hard work to get there if we are honest and whitehat.

While investments from Google and SalesForce.com don't on their own translate into value for HubSpot users, both are clear thought and market leaders in their space and should signal sales and marketer leaders to pay attention. Additionally, HubSpot is pre-integrated with Salesforce.com enabling joint HubSpot/SalesForce.com clients to push lead intelligence originating from a business website all the way out to the field, automatically! Can you tell I am excited!!

BTW, I read this post and entire thread as part of my purchase decision, so thanks collectively for the crowd-sourced purchase input! I found this post/thread with the following Google Search - (hubspot site:seomoz.org) - always find out what your trusted friends have to say before you buy!

There's a lot of HubSpot loving going on, and given the financing, the growth, and the product most of it is well deserved. That said, I wanted to throw a caveat out there. We used them for several months and ended up canceling our account, largely because we didn't need the CRM and we couldn't do some customized tracking if we adopted their CMS.

I would have loved to have stayed with them, and was dreading the call with our rep because we had a good relationship. However, like any well trained rep she worked hard to hold onto our business, and in the process did something that I felt borded on being deceitful.

They have a keyword rank tracking tool that graphs the number of keywords you have in certain ranges - I think it's top 10 and top 100 or something like that. Much like the SEOmoz process, when you sign up for the account you put in a bunch of keywords, and then - as you learn more about SEO and keyword research - you start to add more keywords to the list you want to track. Well, if you think about how that graph would look - the line tracking the number of keywords for which you are ranking in the top 100 keeps going up. And you might have the impression that it is because HubSpot is working and you're making SEO progress. In reality, the line is going up and up BECAUSE YOU'RE ADDING MORE KEYWORDS. ie: you had these 10 keywords out there for which you didn't even know you were ranking in the top 100, and when you discover them you put them in the tracking software to see how they progress. Suddenly your graph jumps up ten notches and it looks like you're doing better, when in reality the underlying ranking hasn't actually changed at all. You were already ranking well, you just didn't know it, and the HubSpot interface makes it look like you're gaining significant ground.

When my rep learned that we were going to wrap up our account, she launched into what seemed like a pretty well trained account retention process. (I have a number of sales/service reps at my company, and we do this kind of training for all of them.) To my great disappointment, one of her key bullet points was pulling up that keyword tracking chart and saying essentially, "But look at how much progress you're making and how many keywords you've moved into the top brackets..." I had realized how this chart miscontrued things a few weeks into using the software, and I was REALLY hoping that the rep wouldn't try this approach in our wrap up call. When she did it dropped the company a big notch on the integrity chart. My hope is that it was an isolated incident with a rep who was acting on her own, but everything about HubSpot is so well oiled and trained that I just got a sinking feeling in my stomach.

HubSpot folks - if you're reading this, I had a lot of respect for the company and was really hopeful it would have worked out. Even when we decided it wasn't a fit for us, I would have gladly recommended you to friends. After this one interaction, I no longer could offer that recommendation.

I am the VP of Customer Success at HubSpot. We strive to make successful, happy customers and we take our integrity very seriously. I am somewhat dismayed that you had such a poor experience and that you feel deceived. I just can't apologize enough.

I understand all too well that "SEO progress" can be misrepresented using keyword rankings and other data. I know that some bad elements make it a regular practice to "spin" customers using ranking information to make it look like there has been progress, or that they have produced results, when in fact they have not. These are cheap tricks. This type of thing isn't in the HubSpot playbook. We absolutely wouldn't train anyone to use these types of techniques or encourage our people to mislead customers. We're not evil!

In fact, one of the things our customers say they love about HubSpot is that our people are genuinely invested in the success of their business. People at HubSpot actually get excited when our customers succeed and we spend lots of time and energy trying to come up with ways to help customers succeed even more and get better results. Call us crazy, but we honestly care about our customers and want to see our customers do well.

I suspect that what happened here is that the rep you spoke with made an honest, well-meaning, but totally wrong interpretation of the data. I completely understand why that would leave a very bad taste in your mouth. I can't prove this is what happened, but working every day with HubSpotters and having a relatively small team, I suspect this is what happened. I suspect our training wasn't up to snuff, which is why this happened, rather than there being an integrity problem.

I hope you can believe that we're not evil. We believe the only way for us to succeed is for our customers to succeed. If I didn't believe this deep down, I would quit HubSpot today.

I will take your comments back to my team and make sure we learn from this experience. In particular, I'll make sure we do deeper training on the keyword chart you mentioned so we don't hit this issue again.

If you have other ideas of what I can do to improve the experience of future customers, or if I can do anything to restore your trust, please contact me - I'd be happy to chat.

I think SEO also provides almost 60% of what inbounding marketing does, but yes inbound marketing takes it further & add things that lacks in SEO. With recent change in algorithm we are surely going to see a time where SEO & Inbound marketing are going to be merged as both of this are equally important to the business.

Both SEOmoz & Hubspots are doing a great job in providing their clients with such useful tools that are not great with features but yeilds great results too.

Google investing in inbounding marketing makes me think that they want to incorporate many of the other user behaviour, to make their algo much more effiecent & spam free. For salesforce its a really a win situation in investing in markting firm, beacuse they are one of the largest company in providing the CRM solutions for business.

The thing about tools like Hubspot are that they are never going to be able to do quality link building, they are never going to be able to do things you can do with your hands, they are never going to be able to phone up a link building opportunity, even customer support via social media sure they make it easier but really their are ahost of tools to do it but I like their methadology of brining it all together but isnt that what SEO MOZ does to some degree ;) I agree the graph is wrong their are many mroe players in the market any one doing Digital Marketing Management will know this.

But yes these types of tools do make things easy for small business, who want assistance in managing their social media, want assistance writing content for their website, for people who want assistance working on their basic website/blog.

Once you step it up a notch and get a huge ecommerce website, you have a huge user base you can not exactly turn to Hubspot and pump in the URL and boom your internet marketing is done, you need the expert consultants to work their magic =)

I agree with comments above SEO's really need to get a niche and dominate that =)

I totally agree. Software is not going to be able to produce great content for you, nor attract quality links, nor buld and expand your online community in social media. Only people can do those things.

All software does is make those people more productive, identify opportunities (by telling you what's working and what's not) and channel your limted resources.

I found Hubspot a couple of years ago when I was beginning with putting SEO, Social Media, and inbound marketing together. I signed up for a white paper, downloaded and got a call the next day.

The salesman did a walk through of all of the tools and how it worked, and I was sold. Our site was hosted on WP, but I was completely unfamiliar with WP at the time, so I made the decision to switch over to Hubspot.

Our leads have increased since moving over, thanks to some of the tips they offered, but the software itself does not increase leads. If you have a site that doesn't get leads already, and that you don't spend time on, then Hubspot won't help you.

Here are some things I'm dissappointed with about Hubspot

The transfer from WP to hubspot was not so smooth, they were careless on some of the CSS and the site was not appearing correctly.

They also built the site in tables, which I hate.

Worst of all, our doctype was XHTML 1.0 transitional and would not validate, no matter how hard we worked.

Our page speed score also suffered because of the large amount of javascript and css files included in the head.

You don't have complete control over everything on the site either

Want a sidebar that is uniform throughout your site? Not possible at this time, you have to update the sidebar on each page of the site

When creating forms, it would be nice to have 2 or 3 forms that are used site wide, instead I find some of the forms duplicate themselves and before long the number of forms gets out of hand

Want to Edit a page? Expect 2-3 times as many clicks to do so as with WordPress

CRM? Not really they store your leads and the info about them, but if you are savvy you can create the same type of tracking data they produce.

They like to make huge changes and announce them after the fact in the forums, for instance, they dropped google from their keyword ranking tool for bing instead and announced it in the forum. I don't even look at that tool anymore because I really don't care where my site is in Bing

Feature Requests? Always the same answe, I'll submit that to my product development team, you never hear anything about it again.

Hubspot uses ASP.net, php is much more effective

That being said, there are some great things about Hubspot, and I think it is a good tool for non developers and designers, or, small businesses who want to do it on their own.

Some good things about Hubspot:

Slimmed down analytics tools make it easy to interpret data

Social Media integration for those that don't know how that works

Excellent resources for teaching yourself how to be an inbound marketer

An excellent onboarding program where they walk you through the entire software over 5, 1 hour phone training sessions

A feed of important developments on your site, like new links, social media conversations, alexa rank changes (the link grader is the best part of the software)

So, the problem with Hubspot may be that I've grown as a web developer and outgrown the functionality of Hubspot. We'll be taking our site back to wordpress and fixing all of the problems that I listed in the first part of the post.

Conclusion:

If you are savvy at coding, Hubspot is not the right choice, but, if you are a small business owner who doesn't code, this is probably the perfect tool for you.

Just about all of your criticism (much related to our CMS) is pretty well placed.

Your conclusion is also pretty accurate. For folks that are web developers (or super-savvy), HubSpot is often not a great fit. Our happiest customers are those that broadly need many of the capabilities HubSpot provides, but don't have the technical sophistication to assemble the pieces themselves. If you just use us for the CMS, we're never going to compare favorably to WordPress.

As it turns out, there are hundreds of thousands of businesses that need a simple web presence, draw some traffic in through search and social media, put up simple landing pages with forms, collect lead data into a database, nurture their email subscribers and analyze how all that is going. And, though much of this can be accomplished by great "best of breed" tools (like WordPress and Google Analytics), putting all that stuff together is non-trivial. Our mission is to help those mainstream businesses and make the power of internet marketing available to them.

In each of our individual apps, there are limitations. Our strategy is to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts.

Not a problem, like I said, Hubspot really kick started everything for us in the beginning, but I've progressed beyond it's capabilities as a developer and designer. It really is a great tool for non-programmers looking to handle everything in house. Thanks for all of your help up to this point.

Since I've joined SeoMoz I am spending 80% of the time reading stuff, 10% testing stuff and 10% working on projects - before that was the other way around. You should put a time limit for all users around here .. no more then 1-2 h a day logged in time :)

I am glad to hear more money and attention is coming to inbound marketing. We are all tired of traditional marketing and the interruption approach. I speak at conference on the topic and so many people are unaware how the old ways are dying out in favor of the new approach of conversing with your audience instead of just shouting at them.

I'm not a Hubspot customer, but I've attended several webinars and spent hours browsing their blog. Most web marketing seminars start out with: This is Twitter... T W I T T... and are dreadfully simple. Hubspot gets to the meat of it so beginners can walk away with homework and novice marketers like me can pick up some new techniques to implement.

Give the webniars a try, then dive into the blog. It's time well invested.

Hard sales is not our thing, but building an inbound SEO framework as delineated is more our style. The tools offered via SEOmoz are nice, and we understand HubSpot's methodology as well. It's all about the content. These methods were taught in my Masters program. Thanks for the read.

I am a chemical engineer I have a company that manufactures plastics. I found HubSpot spoke to them their sales process is excellent so in fact I started telling all my friends all about HubSpot this led to a very cool Facebook message the other day my friend who is also in plastics I recommended HubSpot to one year go April 22nd. Anyway he was writing me to thank me saying last month he had made "$30,000 in profit from inbound marketing" I also really enjoyed learning how search engine optimization works and trying my best to understand how to implement it. I took it to a new level on January 1 of this year starting With a friend my own Internet marketing company. I actually enjoy this and don't consider it work so if this means anything at all I've worked with HubSpot over 3 years and have nothing but good things to say about them. I learned of SEOmoz maybe 3 years ago as well I respect everyone here and enjoy the feeling of mutual respect I received when speaking to another member or a member of the staff. I recently went pro on SEOmoz I have to say it is worth every penny. I think I'm a good judge character I've founded three companies all of them are still in business and making a profit. I don't want to sound like I'm brown nosing however if you are somebody just getting into online marketing I have always known I can trust SEOmoz and HubSpot to guide me in the right direction. I feel very blessed that I did not take bait like phone calls offering me "if you give us $1 today and the 5 keywords you would like to be listed for in one week you will be in number 1 for all Keywords given." I asked the gentleman how he was going to achieve that he told me "he has a deal with Google" it was not pay per click either so I'm still perplexed as to if the gentleman was actually going to steal my credit card number because he did want that dollar or he would do some cockamamie keyword stuffing job on my site. Either way the reason I'm going on and I apologize but I am going on is if anybody is reading this that has been there I know you can trust the people at SEOmoz and HubSpot to tell you what is a good deal and what could get you in trouble with Google. Also I've heard people in this express outgrowing HubSpot however I feel that's most impossible considering they allow for you to use separate systems you are not forced into using the HubSpot CMS (I like it I'm just letting people know it's not a requirement) you may do something like use limelight CMS with HubSpot analytics and the ability to integrate salesforce with your choice of website or content management system in addition using HubSpot with this I feel is a big benefit you get the best of everything. I'm happy to say SEOmoz and HubSpot work with each other and that's exciting because when 2 brilliant companies get together we get much better software. When people saying the software as a crutch and will allow people with no knowledge to take over. HubSpot makes you pay for training they obviously can't force you to do it but who wouldn't? So software is just another tool as I like to say "it's not the bow it the Indian"

In general a very interesting article and good intro into the idea of 'inbound marketing', however I have one issue with the article.

' Next time someone asks you whether all this SEO, social media + blogging stuff is for real, you can tell them it's real enough that Google Ventures, Salesforce and Sequoia put $32 million of their own investment dollars behind it.'

You seem to suggest that investment proves the worth of inbound marketing, when in reality it doesn't prove anything. It may be indicative that there's interest in the development of the area but the sums invested are largely irrelevent. In the 90s everyone thought that AI would develop robots which would be able to perform your every command, hundreds of millions of $s of overinvestment and realisiations of the limitations of AI later. We do not have those.

The money invested certainly doesn't show that inbound marketing is 'for real'. More an indication that people believe it could be for real.

WOW, I am thrilled to see this, you see I use Hubspot and Infusionsoft... They are much more than SW APPS, they educate there customers with private content via webinars, whitepapers, etc. You see, they are "education companies" more than SW companies... Best to ALL, Brian-

Great Post Rand! It's great to see posts like this that help support our efforts on the front lines. Your statement 'the competition's going to heat up and a lot more marketers are likely to find themselves backed by good software.' couldn't be more spot on! It's the automators of this industry that will make the greatest impact on the reputation and reliability of our business!

As I open my laptop this evening to complete my presentation for Friday morning, I come across this post about Hubspot.

My presentation to our local Hollywood, Florida Chamber of Commerce will focus on their newly re-designed website (courtesy of SoFla Web Studio) and an overall focus of marketing online.

Inbound Marketing always seems to be the most appropriate subject for us in these types of presentations because it is all encompassing and a new way of thinking (especially for some of the businesses that have been involved in the chamber for many years).

Now I have some fresh data to work with and some nice new factoids too!

Rand - how (if at all) does this announcement impact your vision for SEOmoz? I have to believe it is a jolt of adrenaline for you, but does it alter your current roadmap in any way you feel comfortable sharing?

I understand the salesforce type of lead generation and tracking functionalities but do you really need the CMS and other SEO related modules? Are they really useful? At the end of the day, it won't do link building for you so I just don't understand the SEO value here?!

I like the idea of a premium SEO platform for a "blog" or "cms" system with customer help or "consulting." That alone for some people is worth the price, especially for people that aren't so tech savvy. Pricing seems very competitive, but would they be better served showing "monthly" cost instead of yearly? $250 a month... might look better than $3000 a year. ;)

So thrilled to hear you find HubSpot's pricing in line with our value - always great to hear.

Now re: monthly vs. annual on the website - you'd be amazed at the number of internal debates we have on that topic. I see a future A/B test in the works once we nail the next few iterations of our homepage.

The reason this is so big to me is it shows that google is indeed saying website optimization is here to stay.

I have to say, I hate the website grader they have created. Before i started with the company I work for it's the only way they gave clients a website review, and i find it very lackadaisical. It isn't indepth enough like some of the tools you guys offer, and it just skims the surface. It's been the hardest fight for me to get clients to understand that website grader is not the be all end all.

Hubspot is great but I did not like the fact they wanted me to pay 9,000 dollars to use their tracking software with my own website. They wanted me to move my webstie to their server and use their templates. I like having full control over my own site.

O have to agree, that's one of the biggest turn off's to hubspot for me. The second problem I have with hubspot is believablity. There is no accurate discription of just how thier service works or what they do on the entire website that I can find.

Yup mk3y .. tend to agree with you there (on the believeability score) .. but their model does seem to work. And the fact they got Google et al to part with so much cash probably means that their pricing will only increase from here.

Great article on hubspot and inbound marketing. Really opened my eyes to an upcoming trend in online marketing and traffic generation. I have been looking into generating traffic to my blog using hubspot. Now you have got my wheels rolling. thanks for staying on top of things.